Bethlehem Marine is laid to rest

As Marines prepared to battle insurgents in Fallujah in the fall, Cpl. Kyle Grimes thought about the possibility he might not survive. He decided to send his family a letter.

"My biggest fear is not dying," he wrote from Iraq. "It's thinking of my family having to carry on without me."

His family and hundreds of friends gathered Friday at Bethlehem's St. Anne's Catholic Church to begin their life without him.

Grimes, 21, a marksman involved in the capture of some of Saddam Hussein's top government officials, died Jan. 26 when the military helicopter he was riding in crashed in western Iraq, killing all 31 on board.

During the service people sobbed and occasionally laughed through their tears as the Rev. Richard Jacobs, a Villanova University professor and friend of the family, read letters that Grimes wrote to his family while serving overseas.

As some of the Marines he had grown close to during the war died, Grimes told his family how much he appreciated being alive and how the routine worries of life, such as getting a promotion or paying the bills, now seemed trivial.

"I'll be happy to be alive next week," Grimes wrote in the fall. "It is in places like these where you realize how fragile life is, how fast it goes away."

Jacobs also told of an earlier, less-polished effort by Grimes, a first-grade assignment in which the boy wrote "I want to be a Mreen."

Grimes, a 2001 Liberty High School graduate, was a fire team leader in the 3rd Platoon, Company C, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment based in Honolulu.

He was riding with 29 fellow Marines and a sailor in a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter when it crashed outside the desert town of al-Rutbah, about 220 miles west of Baghdad.

The helicopter went down during a sandstorm as it transported troops assigned to security operations for Sunday's national elections, according to the Department of Defense.

Grimes was the eighth serviceman from the Lehigh Valley and surrounding counties to die while serving in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq.

The accident was the deadliest single incident for the U.S. military in Iraq. The second worst was on Nov. 15, 2003, when two Black Hawk helicopters trying to avoid gunfire over Mosul collided, killing 17 troops.

On Friday, Liberty's Grenadier Band formed outside the high school on Linden Street and played "Amazing Grace" and the school's alma mater as the motorcade carrying Grimes' casket drove past on the way to the church.

Outside St. Anne's, only footsteps, gentle sobs and the cries of children broke the silence of hundreds as the six Marine pallbearers removed the flag-draped casket from the hearse.

Among the mourners were young people who grew up with Grimes, older congregants of the church who knew the family, teachers, and motorcycle riders from throughout the country who are close with Grimes' father, Robert, a fellow biker.

In one of his letters, Cpl. Grimes said he saw his sister, 24- year-old Rachael, as one of the people who best understood him and perhaps who was most proud of him.

She spoke briefly at the service, through sobs, saying what her brother meant to her.

"Not by the way of his death, but by the way he lived his life, Kyle was my hero," she said.